Living against America

Walking into the classroom on the first day of spring semester 2009, I announced that the course, Introduction to American Studies, would examine the different ways that people have understood “America” and would compare those understandings to the historical evidence. Then I asked each student to write a brief answer to this question: What is the most important way that America enters your awareness? This was the fifth year I had taught this course at the American University of Beirut (aub), and, having tried a number of such exercises, I had come to expect surprises. Previously, I had posed an even more open-ended question: What word do you most closely associate with America? The responses to that question formed an extraordinary spectrum that ranged from the deeply critical to the fawning: violent, racist, greedy, arrogant, ignorant, superficial, young, multicultural, powerful, modern, successful, innovative, rich, hip, transparent, free, and happy. My new question elicited less overtly judgmental responses. Many of the ways students noticed an American presence might be characterized as cultural: television, film, music, sports (basketball, introduced to Lebanon over one hundred years ago at the aub, has become an absolute obsession).1 A related U.S. presence is commercial; here students identified fast-food chains (which are very successful, especially in Beirut) and products such as computers, iPods, and jeans. Students were often unaware that some of the influences and enterprises they identified were not, strictly speaking, American—particularly fashion trends, supermarkets, and malls, where Europe is the more important source. The United States sometimes functions as a stand-in for the West, the modern, and the processes of globalization. Other students identified institutions such as the World Trade Organization (wto), with which Lebanon is now in negotiation; they see the wto as a U.S.-dominated organization that is forcing Lebanon to liberalize its economy and crack down on violations of intellectual property rights. Still others pointed to the aub itself, a U.S.-chartered school that has always had an American president and has had a significant influence not only on its own students but on Lebanon and the entire Arab world. Some students were particularly aware of U.S. State Department efforts at public diplomacy, such as the Arabic-language Hi magazine, Radio Sawa, and the Al Hurrah television network (although they uniformly mocked these as ineffective attempts to win hearts and minds at a time when U.S. foreign policies and actions seemed at odds with Arab concerns). Many students spoke of America as part of their day-to-day environment, as if it were a kind of medium in which they were embedded, but one that simultaneously connected them to a wider world. Indeed, my students are all fluent in English and speak it with a decided American accent. This is reinforced not only by their education and the American media and entertainment industries but also—crucially—by the Internet

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• Teaching U.S. History Abroad

  E Casper, Steve Casper et al.•Journal of American History•2010

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